Memoirs of the Comtesse du Barry | Page 8

out. This time the prince only saw bears and wolves, and the third time he perceived only cats and dogs, fighting and combating each other. Then Basine said to him: I will give you an explanation of what you have seen: The first figure shows you your successors, who will excel you in courage and power; the second represents another race which will be illustrious for their conquests, and which will augment your kingdom for many centuries; but the third denotes the end of your kingdom, which will be given over to pleasures and will lose to you the friendship of your subjects; and this because the little animals signify a people who, emancipated from fear of princes, will massacre them and make war upon each other."
Louis read the prediction and passed the paper to the Countess: "After us the end of the world," said she gaily. The King laughed, but the abbe de Beauvais celebrated high mass at Versailles after the carnival of 1774, and dared to say, in righteous anger: "This carnival is the last; yet forty days and Nineveh shall perish." Louis turned pale. "Is it God who speaks thus?" murmured he, raising his eyes to the altar. The next day he went to the hunt in grand style, but from that evening he was afraid of solitude and silence: "It is like the tomb; I do not wish to put myself in such a place," said he to Madame du Barry. The duc de Richelieu tried to divert him. "No," said he suddenly, as if the Trappist's denunciation had again recurred to him, "I shall be at ease only when these forty days have passed." He died on the fortieth day.
Du Barry believed neither in God nor in the devil, but she believed in the almanac of Liege. She scarcely read any book but this-- faithful to her earliest habits. And the almanac of Liege, in its prediction for April, 1774, said: "A woman, the greatest of favorites, will play her last role." So Madame the Countess du Barry said without ceasing: "I shall not be tranquil until these forty days have passed." The thirty-seventh day the King went to the hunt attended with all the respect due to his rank. Jeanne wept in silence and prayed to God as one who has long neglected her prayers.
Louis XV had not neglected his prayers, and gave two hundred thousand livres to the poor, besides ordering masses at St. Genevieve. Parliament opened the shrine, and knelt gravely before that miraculous relic. The least serious of all these good worshippers was, strange to say, the curate of St. Genevieve: "Ah, well!" said he gaily, when Louis was dead, "let us continue to talk of the miracles of St. Genevieve. Of what can you complain? Is not the King dead?"
At the last moment it was not God who held the heart of Louis--it was his mistress. "Ask the Countess to come here again," he said.
"Sire, you know that she has gone away," they answered.
"Ah! has she gone? Then I must go!" So he departed.
His end drew forth some maledictions. There were insults even at his funeral services. "Nevertheless," said one old soldier, "he was at the battle of Fontenoy." That was the most eloquent funeral oration of Louis XV.
"The King is dead, long live the King!" But before the death of Louis XVI they cried: "The king is dead, long live the Republic!"
Rose-colored mourning was worn in the good city of Paris. The funeral oration of the King and a lament for his mistress were pronounced by Sophie Arnould, of which masterpiece of sacred eloquence the last words only are preserved: "Behold us orphaned both of father and mother."
If Madame du Barry was one of the seven plagues of royalty, she died faithful to royalty. After her exile to Pont aux Dames she returned to Lucienne, where the duc de Cosse Brissac consoled her for the death of Louis XV. But what she loved in Louis was that he was a king; her true country was Versailles; her true light was the sun of court life. Like Montespan, also a courtesan of high order, she often went in these dark days to cast a loving look upon the solitary park in the maze of the Trianon. Yet she was particularly happy at Lucienne.
I have compared her to Manon Lescaut, and I believe her to have been also a sister to Ganesin. All three were destroyed by passion.
One day she found herself still young at Lucienne, although her sun was setting. She loved the duc de Brissac, and how many pages of her past romance would she that day have liked to erase and forget!
"Why do you weep, Countess?" asked her lover.
"My friend," she responded, "I weep because I love you,